Books

Saving energy or stopping pollution is a good thing. What’s the danger in acting now?

We can save energy and stop real pollution without setting up a whole financial bureaucratic system based on “thin air”. The wholly unnecessary trading system feeds the sharks of finance with more money and power. We waste blood, sweat and tears and encourage cheats. We reward fraud and foster corruption.

When we trade real things, people who cheat get caught easily. They can’t get away with it for long. But in the quasi world of meaningless permits-for-air, the only limit to cheating is “what they can get away with”.

For example: Carbon credits paid to China to build hydro dams end up helping bankers buy yachts, and feed the mafiosi in China. They evict homeowners, don’t pay them enough compensation, flood their valleys and commit these people to homelessness or more slavery to bankers through mortgages.

Sure, some useful outcomes might occur. But hoping we get lucky is not “planning”. It’s policy-by-accident. If solar energy, say, is a good idea all on its own, we don’t need to invent fake reasons to force people to use more of it.

How do you tell a scientist from a non-scientist? Where does science end, and propaganda, politics, and opinion begin? You only need to know one thing:

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Straight away, this sorts the wheat from the weeds. We don’t learn about the natural world by calling people names or hiding data. We don’t learn by chucking out measurements in favor of opinions. We don’t learn by suppressing discussions, or setting up fake rules about which bits of paper count or which people have a licence to speak.

A transparent, competitive system where all views are welcome is the fastest way to advance humanity. The Royal Society is the oldest scientific association in the world. Its motto is essentially, Take No One’s Word For It. In other words, assume nothing; look at the data. When results come in that don’t fit the theory, a scientist chucks out his theory. A non-scientist has “faith”, he “believes” or assumes his theory is right, and tries to make the measurements fit. When measurements disagree, he ignores the awkward news, and “corrects”, or statistically alters, the data–always in the direction that keeps his theory alive.

Once again, marvel at the worldwide grassroots network of volunteers. E-mail all your Turkish friends. Click on the image above to see the Turkish Skeptics Handbook II. The first Skeptics Handbook in Turkish was announced in August (and had a rather interesting synopsis of the Turkish situation vis a vis climate change at the time).

What do you do in your spare time — translate scientific and socio-political texts on atmospheric physics?

French Translation Skeptics Handbook II

There are those who are bridges between populations, who fight to spread information — the antidote to darkness.

This is the first translations of the Skeptics Handbook II, “Global Bullies Want Your Money”. (And if you are wondering, this version of the Skeptics Handbook, which has been out since Nov 19, 2009, is not just an update on Skeptics Handbook I. It is a totally new booklet.)

A big thank you again to Pierre Allemand for his professionalism, dedication and skill in translating the text and artwork. The place to go for French-speakers is to skyfal.free.fr

The Franco roots of English are on display: the Tyrannie, the Risques, the Marche du Carbone!

When the Normans conquered England in 1066 they bought French words. English became a quixotic meld of common Germanic words and polysyllabic French ones. (The farm animals were German, but the meat — the beef, poultry, and pork — was from France.)

One of the main arguments from the IPCC is that essentially, we can’t explain temperature changes any other way than with carbon forcings. This is matched with impressive pink and blue graphs that pose as evidence that carbon is responsible for all the recent warming.

This is argumentum ad ignorantiam — essentially they say: we don’t know what else could have caused that warming, so it must be carbon. It’s a flawed assumption.

It’s easy to create impressive graphs, especially if you actively ignore other possible causes, like for example, changes in cloud cover and solar magnetic effects.

Al Gore describes how carbon dioxide beats up Mr Sunbeam and stops him leaving the atmosphere. But he “forgot” to mention that clouds reflect around a quarter of all the sunlight that hits the earth. Those beams of light travel all the way from the sun to get bounced off into space when they are just a few kilometers from the ground.

Any change in cloud cover makes a major difference. The IPCC assumes clouds respond to warming, but clouds could easily drive the warming.

Carbon dioxide only causes 1.1°C of warming if it doubles. That’s according to the IPCC. Did you know?

The real game is water.

Researchers made guesses about humidity and clouds in the early 1980s and they built these guesses into their models. We now know they were wrong, not about carbon, but about water in the form of humidity and clouds. Here’s how the models can be right about carbon and wrong about the climate.

These maps and graphs make it clear just how brazenly unscientific the Hockey Stick is.

It’s clear that the world was warmer during medieval times. Marked on the map are study after study (all peer-reviewed) from all around the world with results of temperatures from the medieval time compared to today. These use ice cores, stalagmites, sediments, and isotopes. They agree with 6,144 boreholes around the world which found that temperatures were about 0.5°C warmer world wide.